Leica Geosystems (Heerbrugg, Switzerland) has been awarded a contract by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to supply laser scanners that will be used to map accident scenes.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey operates the New York/New Jersey major airports, marine terminals, the PATH rail transit system, and six tunnels and bridges connecting the two states.
Leica Geosystems will supply several of its products to the Port Authority from its geosystems High-Definition Survey (HDS) line, including the ScanStation C10 and the HDS70003D laser scanner.
Often used to document vehicular accidents, the C10 3-D laser scanner captures a scene in 360 degrees, accurately mapping the locations of evidence and preserving the relationships between them so the incident can be modeled and reconstructed later in a 3-D computer environment.
The HDS7000, on the other hand, operates at high speed to map major incidents such as airplane crashes where numerous pieces of evidence must be mapped quickly as recovery operations continue.
After an accident, Leica Cyclone software processes the scan to create 3-D models of the accident scene. Investigators rely on the software to visualize the evidence, generate fly-through animations of the scene, and re-create the sequence of events that led up to the incident to help determine how and why a crash occurred.
-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
